iZepto Blog

For those of you from the US, or who just love dates in the mm/dd/yyyy format, today is your day!  iZepto V1.7 now supports both date formats as a company preference.  This effects both the display of dates as well as the entry of dates for time entry creation.

Make sure you check out the Company Preference settings on the Admin page (only if you have Admin privileges of course).

Version 1.6 went out today with some updates to the reporting functionality.  The date section of reports is now split into “All” for reports on all dates, “Period” which is the “last 1 month” type of report and “Date Range” where you can specify a start and end date.

Why Period and Date Range?  Well, if you set up a Period report then the actual date range in your report changes depending on when you run it.  Set up a “current 1 month” type report and you can always see what you have done in the current month.  Set up a “previous 1 month” report ready to do your invoicing at the start of the month for the month just ended.

Don’t forget that you can add a saved report to your Dashboard, and then get the total emailed to you and others daily.  A great way to keep track of budgets and easily communicate with your clients.

The latest release of iZepto now includes Project Sharing.  With Project Sharing you can nominate a project that you want another company to see.  This means they can see the project, all tasks and time entries for those tasks.This feature was requested through our competition, and enables you to let your clients monitor budgets themselves.  Since the project and related information looks like one of their own projects, they can even set up a saved report or even a Watch that emails the report total to them daily.Why try out Project Sharing by going to the Admin page!  Here are some tips:

•  When you share a project, you can name the client that the project will appear under.  Why not call it the name of your company - it will probably be the most logical spot for your client to look under
• You can create reports that combine ‘real’ projects with shared projects
• If someone has shared a project with you, you can edit the client it appears under and even the name and shortcut of that project.  The original project information is unchanged - just your reference changes
• At any time either side can stop the sharing by going to the Share Project page and clicking ‘Stop Sharing’
• When you share a project you can optionally send an email (and CC yourself) with details about the shared project

Congratulations to Anibal for winning our weekly prize of an iPod Nano for best feedback. Anibal provided some great feedback about how it would be great if he could allow his clients to see time entries and report in a read-only way.  He believes this would help clients to manage their own budgets as they would be on top of how many hours are being logged when they are being billed by the hour.
So in response,  here is what we plan to do:
Short Term - this week
We think the existing Dashboard functionality of getting a Watch emailed to you is a good start.  If you have a watch for hours for a particular project, why not email this to your clients directly each day?  So, we will be providing the ability for you to enter in additional email addresses for a Watch. Nice and simple, and for most cases might be enough to keep your client in the loop.
Long Term - By the end of January 
In the longer term, we are going to build functionality such that you can add a new type of user to your company - external reporters.  These users would be added to your company with only privilege to report, and only for Projects that you specify.  They would be able to log in and see the Reporting and Dashboard pages.   They can run reports, save reports they like and add watches on their reports.  They can set up their own emails, etc.
We hope that this functionality will be helpful to many people.So congratulations again to Anibal, we will be contacting you soon to arrange delivery of your shiny new iPod Nano.
Keep the feedback coming, and you too could share in the prizes. 

We just added a feature to iZepto to allow you to see who is keeping their timesheet up to date. It is one of those features that seemed like a good idea, but until I saw it in action against our production data I didn’t realise how useful it would be.The system we used to use allowed to find this information out - it was just a bit hard. So we never really did it except when we had to. Usually at the start of a month doing the invoices. Then I found out people hadn’t been logging time correctly or at all. Sometimes this even caused some grief with clients as I had to go back and say “You know how I said we had only used 10 days budget… I meant to say 50 days”. Ouch. So rejoice all you iZepto users, you can now have your finger even tighter on the pulse of your business - with little effort. Oh, and don’t miss the ‘Send Reminder’ link. It sends an email straight to the user. Awesome!